BYUH students and a professor work to protect the biodiversity of the Pacific’s bird species
Ecosystems worldwide are highly interconnected, so the loss of one bird species can greatly impact the balance of the other plants and animals including humans in the area, said Winston Poh, a senior majoring in biology from Papua New Guinea. “If you remove native birds, then you remove the pollinators for some plants, so you then remove the trees…. Research shows diminishing bird populations actually impact coral reefs and fish populations,” he said.
In the last few months, Poh said he has frequently hiked deep into Oahu’s mountains to find and photograph native birds including the ‘elepaio, ‘amakihi and ‘apapane. On his last six trips into the bush, he said, “It’s void of all noise. You can never see them or hear them.”
Hundreds of years ago, Poh said the sounds of different bird species’ voices would loudly fill the air. Though he shared his passion for science, on a more personal note, he added, “It is sad to visit a place and see it missing a piece.”
On Palmyra Atoll, a refuge among the remote islands of the Pacific and about 1,000 miles south of Hawaii, Poh said research shows deforested areas of land lack stingrays and manta rays in the surrounding water because birds like to sit in the trees where they poop. When it rains, the water carries the nutrients from the feces to the ocean where it ultimately is ingested by fish and later the rays, he said. “When we disrupt that chain, we lose nutrients in that system and everyone is affected, including all of us,” he added.
Simple actions to safeguard native birds
Non-biology students can get involved with birds not only through volunteering with different organizations but also by being aware of the current laws, he said. For example, he said he signed an international petition to help safeguard bird trainer’s work in Scotland with golden eagles. He said voting in elections is also influential.
Keeping cats indoors can protect native Hawaiian birds, Poh said, especially during fallout season when seabirds like Hawaiian petrels (‘ua‘u), Newell’s shearwaters (‘a‘o) and wedge-tailed shearwaters (‘ua‘u kani) use moonlight to navigate and young birds migrate for the first time between the land and sea. Artificial lights can disorient them, causing the birds to fall to the ground from exhaustion, he continued.
The Hawaii Audubon Society recommends keeping a box and a clean towel in vehicles to rescue downed birds and then delivering them to Feather & Fur Animal Hospital in Kailua. He said, “Gently toss a towel on the bird and put it in a box.” To identify downed birds as opposed to birds just sitting on the ground, he said, “Usually they’ll try to get away from you, but they’re too exhausted to fly … Any quick Google photo search will figure out for you [what kind of bird it is].”
He also said, “Learning the native birds of the area [where you] live doesn’t take a lot of effort. The Internet will pop up with a list.” The websites iNaturalist and eBird are great places to report bird sightings, he added. “All of that data gets verified by real scientists and helps us map data and use it for conservation and research, ” he said. “Snap a photo. Put the date you saw it and the time you saw it.”
Oahu’s birds
New bird species have been introduced to the islands in the last centuries, said Phillip Bruner, an associate professor in the Faculty of Sciences and a former president of the Hawai‘i Audubon Society. Some invasive bird species like egrets, munias, zebra doves and even pigeons might be familiar to BYU–Hawaii students from walking through the front of campus to class. Bruner said many introduced species, like myna birds, came as caged birds. He said they were originally introduced to control insects. “They’ve been here a long time, but they haven’t evolved into a distinct species.”
Despite the introduction of bird species, Bruner said Hawaii’s natural biodiversity has declined in the last few hundred years as birds have gone extinct or become endangered. When Europeans first arrived here, he said, “There was a great variety of types, particularly forest birds,” but most of them are now extinct due to changes to Hawaii’s forests and the introduction of mosquitoes.
Bruner specializes in migratory shorebirds, including Pacific golden plovers, or “kolea,” and ruddy turnstones, known as “‘akekeke.” While these birds are familiar in Laie, he said the shorebirds don’t spend all their time in the Hawaiian Islands. “While they are here in Hawaii, it’s every bird for himself. There’s no pair bonding or reproducing,” he added.
During breeding season, the shorebirds fly to the Arctic, where abundant insects hatch despite the cold and predators in Alaska. “It’s like they’re living in the middle of a grocery store.” When the adult birds have newly hatched chicks to feed, those insects become important for survival, shared Bruner.
Researching migratory shorebirds
Back in the early 1970s, Bruner went with Oscar “Wally” Johnson, an ornithological researcher, and Johnson’s son, to Nome, Alaska, in hopes of observing the birds there. “We were so naive,” laughed Bruner. Their first time there, they crammed into a small tent with no vehicle or weapon, he shared. They weren’t prepared for the large mosquitoes, rough roads and rapidly changing weather, he said.
Though passionate about shorebirds, he said researching them can be difficult. Due to the small gap of time between the snow melting and the mosquito population booming, the work is time sensitive, he added. In Nome, with few people and seasonal road conditions, he said stuck vehicles mean researchers may have to walk 40 miles back, relying on satellite phones for communication.
In the years since, Bruner, Johnson and Bruner’s late wife have gone back with others to learn about the birds and mark the birds’ nests. While the researchers needed help in relocating the nests eachyear, he explained the birds “will always come back to the same area, sometimes to the same nest.” In the beginning, he said the researchers would mark a nest with rocks and record the distances between nearby nests as footsteps, with his wife’s gift of total recall to help. However, he said they eventually switched over to marking nests using GPS signatures and had to mark “over 2,000 nests spread over 10 miles of area.”
Work with falconry
When Poh was 12, he said his family “rescued a bunch of wild kites in PNG … I fell in love with them.” He had previously cared for a wild parrot, but working with the birds of prey introduced him to falconry, he shared. To learn more, he was virtually mentored under an English master falconer. Since then, “I have worked with six to seven different species and over 20-plus birds,” Winston Poh said.
In 2017, he said he represented PNG and Oceania in the United Arab Emirates as a delegate at the International Festival of Falconry. PNG is special because it is the only Pacific Island nation that practices falconry, he shared. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Hawaiian hawk or “‘io” is a kind of raptor found only in Hawaii. However, Poh said while Hawaii offers avian rehabilitation and veterinary care services, it lacks Hawaiian hawk training programs.
Though some animals depend on humans for survival after being cared for while young, Poh explained falconry is different. “Birds used in falconry are always wild animals. Though they work with us to hunt, it is by their choice that they stay … At any point while we are out hunting, [they can] choose to return to the wild.” He said a falconer’s relationship with their bird is mutually respectful.
Along with being an art form and cultural practice, he said falconry also serves an environmental function. “We often work with young birds … These birds are inexperienced and on average 70 percent of them won’t survive their first year,” he explained.
After training the young birds and hunting with them for a year or two before returning them to the wild, he said, “research has shown 95 percent of the birds … will successfully breed in the wild and live for a long time.” Falconry can help maintain a healthy population of wild birds of prey, especially in places like Hawaii where they are threatened, he shared, bringing balance to other bird populations.
He also shared, “falconers live and work with their birds of prey on a daily basis, which gives the falconers an intimate understanding of birds of prey.” He said, “This knowledge … is useful as it gives us insights into how to better conservation efforts for wild bird of prey populations.” In the time he has been a falconer, Poh said the techniques he learned are also valuable for helping rehabilitate other injured birds.
Art, birds and relationships’ healing power
Beka Poh, Winston Poh’s younger sister and a junior majoring in English, said growing up around a lot of animals was a blessing because having caring relationships with animals helped her family work through their emotions from a complicated family dynamic. For some of her siblings, connections with cats and dogs were healing, she said, while Winston Poh was more drawn toward wild birds.
She used to hate painting, but she shared one day her brother showed her a sketch of a bird and asked her to paint it. After that, she said she loved art and found emotional healing through visual art and poetry. “I feel like art has been a great way to express myself without having to write words,” she said.
Though she has written poems about and painted a variety of things, she said she is regularly inspired by birds. As she got older, she noticed painting birds of prey is “a niche art a lot of people don’t explore. We could use more.” She said she hopes her art “brings awareness to birds.”
From a young age, she said she and her brother tried to find ways to protect native birds since, “there is a lot of logging on the island we ended up on,” she shared. With Winston Poh in their teenage years, she said they worked together, “him doing falconry and me painting,” to help birds threatened by deforestation. Recently, Beka Poh said she has worked with Winston Poh on paintings. “He will help me with the base sketch because he is good at bird anatomy.” He also does lots of photography of birds that she uses, she said.
Though she said she loves poetry, she has found, “more people are willing and eager to look at my art than to sit down and read a poem.” She said birds are sometimes seen as less personable than dogs or cats, so art “can be the leveling ground for people to learn about science” and engage with birds. She also found working closely with her brother through their love of nature and art has been both productive and healing, she said, because they have been able to deepen their sibling relationship using their shared passions. Beka Poh explained art has made both engagin with threats to native bird species and their complicated private emotions “less threatening.”
As she has joined the editorial staff for the Kula Manu literary journal this semester, she said she hopes they will “use birds in [their] advertisements” since kula manu in Hawaiian is a gathering place of birds.
Winston’s involvement with birds in Hawaii
Kolea are a protected species of bird that can be seen all over the BYUH campus, said Winston Poh. Even though kolea are not apex predators like the ‘io, Winston Poh said he has learned useful skills, such as bird tagging and GPS tracking techniques, through working with Bruner, Johnson and other researchers. As he plans to return to PNG for his internship to work with birds, he said he will continue to draw upon his experiences with kolea.
Since Bruner and Johnson began marking nests with GPS, research has expanded to include attaching GPS trackers to caught kolea to monitor their journeys from Hawaii to the north and back again. “I think the exciting part is when we get to retrap a bird and remove the satellite tag,” he said. “A year ago we had it in our hands,” he said talking about a bird that then flew all the way to Alaska to breed, “and then it flew all the way back to this tiny little plot at Punchbowl Cemetery” where they were able to recapture it and download the bird’s flight information.